2019 Predictions

I listen to a few podcasts that do predictions for next year, then at the end of every year, they reflect back on their predictions to see what happened. I decided that I wanted to get in on the action and I am going to try to do it too. For your entertainment, here are my 2019 predictions.

Microsoft Windows Desktop Environment for Linux

That’s right, I predict that Microsoft will release a desktop environment for Linux that is a very close approximation to the Windows 10 desktop environment. With the changes to Edge and other moves that Microsoft has been making, I think this is a real possibility. Microsoft is about to surpass Windows sales with Azure sales, the effort in ARM, and the push to support many of their developer tools on Linx are large factors in this one. It will be cool to see what happens.

Confidence is greater than 90%.

Container alternatives gain traction

While I think containers are cool, overlaying an entire operating system seems like a lot of extra overhead that still hides a lot of the issues that we are just dealing with. Security is a concern for me and we still end up with magic dependencies that are a just a little better isolated. So “containers” like Snaps and Flatpak for applications are examples of the type of replacement that I think we will see. This one isn’t as specific as I would like, but it’s hard to call something that doesn’t exist, or I haven’t discovered yet.

Confidence is greater than 60%.

Microsoft invests in Wine for Apps

Another crazy sounding one, however, hear me out. Valve has done tremendous work getting Steam working on Linux. First, it was a layer that converted Direct3D to OpenGL, now we have projects like Proton and DXVK pushing Wine to enable better support for running Windows-exclusive games on Linux. People are investing in this tech and I could see Microsoft stepping in to make sure that Office, Teams, etc. run with way better support and stability in this area. This will allow them to push into the Linux market and prep for possible creating a Linux distro.

Confidence is greater than 80%.

Conclusion

These are my predictions, I would enjoy hearing from you about your thoughts and predictions. Feel free to reach out on Twitter, LinkedIn, or log an issue in GitHub.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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